CBS dunked over its rival networks in the ratings Monday night with the NCAA men's basketball championship. Early numbers for live sports are not adjusted for time zones and can be unreliable, but it appears the face-off between Kentucky and Connecticut was a predictably big draw for CBS, bringing in an average of 17.8-million viewers. Though that's down 14% from the preliminary numbers for last year's NCAA men's basketball final, it was comfortably the night's most-watched telecast. Up against college sports, NBC's "The Voice" held steady week-to-week among key 18-to-49-year-olds, scoring a rating of 3.4 in the advertiser-coveted demographic.

HBO has spent years looking for another hit like "The Sopranos," and it may have found it in "Game of Thrones. " Season 4 of the epic fantasy opened at 9 p.m. Sunday night averaging 6.6 million total viewers, according to Nielsen. Those are the best numbers for HBO since 2007, when the mob drama "Sopranos" ended with 11.9 million viewers. PREMIERE: Season 4 recap of 'Game of Thrones' It's also a huge bump over the 4.4 million viewers for the season 3 premiere in 2013.

The 49th Academy of Country Music Awards cruised to a ratings victory Sunday night, though the telecast was down from last year, according to early numbers from Nielsen. The ACM Awards on CBS averaged 14.1 million viewers overall, compared with last year's big audience of 15.5 million, for a dip of about 9%. Still, it was safely the most-watched show of the night. This year's gala, at which singer George Strait rode off with the entertainer of the year honor, had the awards show's second-biggest audience in five years.

California-based Virgin America ranked highest among the nation's top 15 carriers in a study that looked at on-time performance, customer complaints and lost bag rates, among other factors. The study, known as the Airline Quality Rating report, also found that airline performance improved in 2013 over the previous year. The ratings report was produced by researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Wichita State University and was based on data collected by the U.S.

The NCAA must be feeling a bit like Dr. Frankenstein these days: assailed by college football and men's basketball players who reject the NCAA's precious, but mostly mythic, notion that they are student-athletes. At Northwestern University, a group of football players scored a first-round victory before the National Labor Relations Board in a campaign to be recognized as "employees" eligible to unionize. For some college football fans, this evokes disturbing images of burly 18- to 22-year-old player-proletarians marching on picket lines instead of lined up on offensive or defensive lines, much less seated in classrooms.

PRETORIA, South Africa - Johan Gerber is a shy, neat man with iron-gray hair, a ready smile and a quiet voice. But on the streets, he has taken to carrying an open pocket knife with a mean 4-inch blade, concealed in an envelope and ready to use. Last month, three men accosted him in broad daylight, one of whom hit him in the stomach and grabbed his cellphone. A few years back, eight men surrounded him, held a knife to his throat and stole his wallet. His car and two trailers also have been stolen.

CBS was the top network Thursday night as "The Millers" surged week-to-week in the ratings, according to early numbers from Nielsen. The Will Arnett comedy, which drew 11.4 million viewers overall, earned a rating of 2.9 in the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic, surging 21% from its last original, when it was softened by March Madness preemptions. "The Big Bang Theory" was again the night's top show, drawing 17.4 million viewers total and...

April 4, 2014 | By Don Lee, This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy added a fairly solid number of new jobs in March as employers reverted to their average pace of hiring after the unusually harsh winter weather. The Labor Department said Friday that the economy created a net 192,000 new jobs last month, just about as many as in February and the average for all of last year. Economists had forecast job growth of about 200,000 for last month. The nation's jobless rate held steady at 6.7% in March, but the broader measure of unemployment and underemployment, including part-time workers who want full-time jobs, edged up to 12.7%.

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